Ahi A Me Wai (Fire & Water)
by easytodancewith
Summary: Danny/Steve. There's nothing quite like a hostage situation to fan the flames of a slow burn - except maybe a boat-jacking and a shark encounter on the open water. As per uzh, a good portion of the dialogue in this was taken pretty much verbatim from two actual episodes of "Hawaii Five-0" (3x2 and 3x3), because the show apparently likes to do half my work for me.


You could say the whole thing began with the murder of a DJ that resulted - weirdly enough - in a retired New York City cop offering his services as Steve and Danny's marriage counselor. You could even go all the way back to the moment Steve and Danny laid eyes on each other for the very first time. The question of what the catalyst was, though, has an answer that's far more clear-cut, because there's nothing quite like a hostage situation to fan the flames of a slow burn.

 **xXx**

"Three armed male suspects knocked over an art gallery," HPD Officer Chang tells Steve, Danny and Kono as they walk swiftly through the Aloha Tower Marketplace. "One guy got shot as they were making off and holed up in that store over there. Between employees and customers, we're estimating at least a dozen hostages."

"He make any demands yet?" Steve queries.

"He says he's willing to give up one of the hostages if we send in medical help."

"OK, if he's really badly wounded, it might be safer for the hostages if we just wait him out," Kono posits.

"Yeah, I like that," Danny chips in. "The Gandhi approach: We sit back, let him croak - situation resolved."

It sounds so sensible, so non-confrontational, so absolutely devoid of bloodshed. Steve's going to hate it.

"Problem with that is..." Steve interjects, just as Danny knew he would, "we need him alive so we can flip him for the names of his partners."

The worst part is that in this case, the Neanderthal of an adrenaline junkie actually makes a great point.

Danny offers a sideways nod of begrudging acknowledgement before flatly stating, "I'm gonna need a vest."

"You don't even know what my plan is yet!" Steve protests, as if _every single idea of his_ hasn't involved shootouts and explosions and raids at dusk and wordsmithing the resultant paperwork straight through till dawn.

"That is true," Danny concedes, "but I know _you_ " (he points to Steve) "and I know that any plan you have is going to involve _me_ " (he points to himself) "and the potential for serious" (he throws up his hands) "- and I mean _serious_ \- bodily harm."

Kono's making the face that means he's using his hands too much, but he needs to underline the damn point he's making somehow because Steve is totally going to deny everything he just said. And sure enough...

"What are you talking about?" Steve asks with all the innocence of someone who views a bullet hole as a flesh wound.

"I'm talking about _this_ , OK?" Danny gestures wildly, then sighs when he's met with a blank stare. "Let's just say that over the years, our marriage has become predictable."

Steve, looking affronted, opens his mouth like he wants to protest but hasn't determined exactly how.

"OK, so, what's the plan?" Kono interrupts with a smirk.

Something in her expression reminds Danny of Tony Archer's face right before he offered to be their marriage counselor, and that's what gets Danny thinking about the former detective in the first place.

 **xXx**

In a bizarre twist of fate, Steve and Danny both end up getting what they wanted: the former, a flash grenade and a standoff involving a hostage, and the latter, no actual shooting due to the fact that their badly wounded suspect collapses before a single shot is fired. Initially, Danny thinks the outcome resulted from some kind of sneaky SEAL maneuver Steve managed to finagle past him, so his first reaction is to ask point blank, "What did you do?"

Steve gets that _Who, me?_ look on his face again.

"What did I…? I didn't do anything!" he protests.

Kono bends over the body, feeling in vain for a pulse.

"He didn't have to," she says, glancing up at them. "Our guy's dead."

 **xXx**

"You were very lucky back there, my friend."

They're driving back to headquarters when Danny brings it up again - or, hey, correction, _Steve's_ driving back to headquarters in _Danny's car_ because he's a control freak and a speed demon who never learned to share as a child.

"I'm sorry, _lucky_?" Steve repeats incredulously. He takes his eyes off the road, which he knows Danny hates. "First of all, luck had nothing to do with it. I had the situation under control."

"Oh, OK, well, you are something else," Danny says airily, because if Steve's seriously trying to sell him on this delusion then, sure, he'll play along for now.

"That's right," Steve says proudly, as if Danny's assessment of him as an _actual and legitimate psychopath_ has gone right over his head.

"You must've somehow magically known our suspect was gonna bleed to death while threatening to kill a hostage," Danny continues in the same indulgent tone.

This time, Steve catches the undercurrent of sarcasm in his voice and purses his lips in a way that reminds Danny of his grandmother.

"You're good," Danny persists. "You're really good. Let me ask you another question: How much money do I have in my wallet, Kreskin? Or, should I say, The Amazing McGarrett?"

Steve glances down at his phone, which had started ringing somewhere around the point Danny had decided against referencing Patricia Arquette's character in _Medium_ and gone with Kreskin instead.

"You done? 'Cause I kinda wanna see who's calling me."

"Don't you already know who's calling you?" Danny deadpans, because he's not letting The Amazing McGarrett off the hook this easily.

"I do. It's Max."

"You're lying."

"I'm not lying." Steve holds up his phone as proof. "I have Caller ID."

 **xXx**

It's around then that Danny starts thinking maybe it wouldn't be the worst idea in the world to call Archer for a check-in or a tune-up or whatever the hell a retired detective with no known background in marriage counseling would call it.

Thing is, Danny's done couples therapy before, and the outcome hadn't exactly been positive. He remembers the main takeaways being 1) he had anger issues and 2) not every relationship is meant to last forever. He would've maligned the counselor for not trying a little harder, but by their first session, Rachel was already 90 percent set on divorce, so there was only so much left to work with.

At least his biggest problem with Steve is that their marriage has become predictable.

 **xXx**

Correction: His biggest problem with Steve is Steve. If his partner weren't so… so absolutely and completely _Steve_ , Danny would never have found himself 40 miles south of O'ahu, his shirt and hair stiff with salt water, bobbing up and down in a dinghy that has a temporarily patched leak and a not so temporarily busted engine. Honestly, who else on the planet but Steve McGarrett could turn a nice, relaxing day of fishing into a boat-jacking and a shark encounter?

Danny hates him. More specifically, he hates everything Steve chooses to be with every ounce of every _fiber_ of his being.

He also hates Tony Archer, the genius who suggested this whole fishing expedition in the first place. Danny isn't fond of the water - hasn't been for years - but when Archer suggested they spend some quality time together and Steve's eyes lit up at the idea of catching Danny's first tuna, Danny didn't have the heart to turn him down.

"This'll be good for you," Archer assured them. "The two of you need to get some balance back. Right now, your relationship's too focused on one thing."

"Sex?" Danny couldn't help but ask, mainly to see the expression on Steve's face.

" _Work_ ," Archer had clarified a little exasperatedly.

His partner, Danny recalls, had merely blinked in response, which was mildly disappointing. Trust a Navy SEAL to have a better poker face than Lady Gaga.

 **xXx**

The thing about being out on the open water is that it kind of has a way of bringing two people closer together, even - or perhaps especially - if they get boat-jacked and almost become shark food. Somehow, Steve coaxes a back-in-Jersey story out of Danny that Danny hasn't told in years, and for good reason: Chronicling your childhood best friend's watery death doesn't exactly count as an entertaining tale in most circles. Truth be told, what happened to Billy Selway still keeps Danny up some nights.

All things considered, Steve handles it well. Come to think of it, he's surprisingly diplomatic for a guy whose M.O. generally involves blowing things up and/or shooting at them. Steve sits quietly (although, honestly, what else is there to do in a dinghy drifting in the middle of the ocean, especially with a tiger shark in the immediate vicinity?), listens without judgment and says he's sorry for Danny's loss without making a big deal out of it, which Danny appreciates. If they manage to evade death by shark, drowning, heatstroke, dehydration or some horrendous fate yet to be determined, Danny figures he should probably buy Steve a beer.

Of course, that's a very big "if."

 **xXx**

One murder victim, one yacht and a couple of _very_ unfriendly members of the Coast Guard later, Danny gets his wish. He's seen people in movies kiss the ground after returning from time spent at sea and always thought the action unnecessarily dramatic, but damn if he doesn't want to do the very same thing right now. Meanwhile, Steve's strutting down the pier like the whole debacle was a mere blip on the McGarrett radar, which Danny finds incomprehensibly irritating.

"We were fine," Steve says calmly as Chin and Kono rush forward to meet them, and Danny can feel his blood pressure rising - like, literally, he can _feel_ it. He's not gonna let Steve rewrite history. They almost _died_ out there.

"We were not fine, OK?" He points to Kono. "Tell her about the sharks." Then he turns to Chin. "Tell _him_."

" _A_ shark," Steve corrects, because, really, the number of sharks is what's important here. "There was one shark. It wasn't a big deal."

" _Of course it was a big deal_ ," Danny splutters. "What are you talking about?! It was a significant, enormous, potentially deadly, _decidedly_ shark-shaped deal. And you wouldn't even punch it in the nose like I told you."

"Like I told _you_ , that's disrespectful to the animal," Steve retorts. "Look, we're back on dry land now. Why do you insist on -"

Chin holds up his hands in a peacekeeping motion.

"You know, you two need to spend some time apart."

Danny mentally curses Steve McGarrett, Tony Archer, the day he first set foot on this island and possibly the day he was born.

"I agree," he tells Chin vehemently, then heads back onto the yacht to check out the crime scene with Steve.

 **xXx**

Honestly, it's always the spouse.

For a hot second, it seemed like it might've been the security guard who used to work in the dead boat guy's neighborhood, but who was the guard in cahoots with? Yeah, the wife. Like Danny said, it's always the freakin' spouse. Turns out Katie Burgess set up the guard to go down for the whole thing, too - used his feelings for her to get him to murder her husband, not to mention help her sidestep the prenup that would've left her with nothing, and all while ensuring the blood stayed off her hands. Danny might even sympathize with the guy if not for the whole being left to die out on the open ocean thing. He feels a flash of gratitude for the comparative civility with which his own marriage had deteriorated, and that's really saying something.

 **xXx**

It's late when Steve calls from the Burgess house to inform Danny that Katie won't be arrested in connection with her husband's murder after all, as her sister-in-law had figured everything out and taken matters into her own hands. Apparently Jenny was still holding the gun when Steve and Kono pulled into the driveway.

"Guess that's karma for you," Danny notes, shaking his head.

He's home on the couch, half-heartedly watching the Pats play the Broncos while Steve's running around kicking ass and taking names, as per usual. When he cracks open a Longboard, he remembers his decision to buy Steve a beer if the two of them ever made it back to the island.

"Hey, you wanna swing by on your way back from Nu'uanu? I got a beer with your name on it."

There's a pause on the other end of the line.

"...This some kinda couples bonding thing Archer told you to do?" Steve asks suspiciously. "Because, no disrespect, Danny, but I think that pretty much played itself out today."

Honestly, Steve _would_ take a perfectly nice, innocent suggestion and turn it into a _thing_.

"It one _hundred_ percent played itself out, Steven, but that doesn't mean I can't offer you a beer after the day we've had."

Steve makes a vague grunting sound that Danny interprets as him conceding the point. "You want me to pick you up some aloe or something on the way?"

Danny blinks and feels the skin at the edge of his eyes crinkle painfully. "Uh…"

Trips to the shore notwithstanding, Danny never really got a lot of sun in Jersey. There was snow on the ground for a good quarter of the year and he was lucky if he got a farmer's tan from driving around in his squad car, so it's fair to say that when he moved to Hawaii, having to deal with the near-ceaselessly beating sun was kind of an adjustment. He'd worked the liberal application of SPF-five-million sunscreen into his morning routine, but even that was no match for the UV rays that streamed down on him for God knows how long while he and Steve floated aimlessly on a dinghy in the middle of the goddamn Pacific Ocean.

"Yeah," Danny tells his partner casually. "You know, if you want."

 **xXx**

Steve shows up on Danny's doorstep with a grin on his perfectly tanned face and an enormous bottle of Banana Boat Aloe After Sun lotion. Danny's annoyed with him on _sight_ because 1) how is his skin not even a _tiny bit red?_ and 2) he's pretty sure Banana Boat is for, like, three-year-olds, but, hell, he'll take it.

"Long time no see," Steve says seriously.

When Danny affixes him with an incredulous stare, he breaks into a lopsided grin.

"You're a savage," Danny murmurs gruffly, trying to keep the smile off his face as he grabs for the lotion and Steve holds it up above his line of reach.

"Damn, you really caught the sun today, huh?" Steve comments, gazing at Danny's face appraisingly.

Danny refuses to dignify that with an answer and merely accepts the proffered lotion when Steve tires of poking fun at his height or lack thereof.

"Do I at least get that beer for my trouble?"

Danny tilts his head in the direction of the blaring TV. "You know the way."

 **xXx**

Moments later, Steve's sitting on the couch with one eye on the game and the other on Danny. Danny's about to call him out on it when Steve holds up his beer and, as Danny leans in to clink their bottles, says, "Hey - to Billy Selway."

"Billy Selway," Danny repeats around the lump of emotion that's suddenly formed in his throat. He hadn't been sure Steve would even remember that part of their conversation in the dinghy, given everything that happened since.

Steve takes a swig and clears his throat.

"Listen, the longer you leave that sunburn untreated, the longer it's gonna take to clear up."

Danny nods toward the lotion on the coffee table in front of them. "Uh, I'm not applying that while you're here. That's weird."

"Why is that weird, Danny? You're applying it to your face, not your -"

" _Steven_ ," Danny interjects firmly.

Steve grabs the bottle. "C'mon, I'll put it on you like eye black. If it's good enough for Tom Brady, it's good enough for you."

"You couldn't at least name a Giants player?" Danny grumbles, but Steve's already upending the container and squeezing some of the lotion onto the tip of his finger.

"Just come here."

"This is _weird_ ," Danny protests as his partner gets all up in his personal space, but the cooling properties of the ointment and the gentle press of Steve's touch as he delineates the stripes quickly dismantle any objections.

"You look good," Steve declares after he's done, then sits back to admire his handiwork.

"I look ridiculous," Danny responds confidently, but he's smiling. He likes seeing this more tender side of Steve. Hell, it definitely beats the hey-let's-blow-up-a-skyscraper-and-parachute-to-safety Steve with whom Danny is _entirely_ too familiar and not at all enamored.

It's funny, Danny thinks - Tony Archer had encouraged them to go on this grand fishing trip to spend some quality time together, but it turns out all they really needed were a couple of beers on the couch.

"You know, I'm glad we got outta that whole mess today," Danny says. "I, uh… I actually had fun before the whole boat-jacking, tiger shark, almost-heatstroke segment kicked in."

Steve gazes at him solemnly, like he's trying to figure out whether there's more to Danny's words than what he's actually saying. Steve gets like this sometimes - usually at the most random intervals - and Danny's yet to identify the cause. Steve McGarrett is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside layers of enigmatic onion peel, or however that goes.

"I had fun too," Steve says softly, maintaining eye contact for just a second too long. He puts the lotion back on the table. "You know, that's not really gonna do much unless you rub it in."

Danny rolls his eyes. For whatever weird reason, he's fond of Tender Steve. He knows his partner will probably head home soon, and then tomorrow he'll have to deal with the usual gung-ho G.I. Joe, so right now it's just… it's just nice to spend time together like this, is all.

"Have at it," he acquiesces, holding up his beer. "I wanna finish drinking this, anyway."

Steve gently brushes Danny's cheekbones with his fingertips, and Danny feels a hitch in his throat at the sensation of the lotion being massaged in circles across the breadth of his sunburnt face. Their eyes meet when Steve's finger catches at the corner crease of Danny's mouth, and Steve's pupils are huge - hopeful and apprehensive, like he's at the edge of a precipice and gathering the nerve to jump.

Danny opens his mouth to say something not yet determined, and Steve fills the space with lips softer than Danny would've expected. It's not a kiss, per se, more a press of lips, and Danny feels Steve pull back just as he realizes how much he really, _really_ doesn't want him to do that.

"Hey," Danny says quietly. Steve won't look at him. "I'm not - it's cool, OK, I'm just gonna…"

He sets down his beer next to the lotion, then glances up at Steve. He's pretty sure the other man hasn't breathed this entire time, which seems unhealthy even for a trained Navy SEAL.

"Steve?" he asks cautiously.

"Yeah."

Danny's seen a lot of different expressions on his partner over the months they've been working together: focused, determined, amused, elated (that last one usually appears after something blows up). He's seen Steve in physical pain, in mental anguish, in the clutches of a pride-tinged sadness generally reserved for members of his family, but he's never known Steve to look quite so uncertain, so it takes a few seconds to register what's happening on his partner's face.

Danny clears his throat. "Will you come here, please?"

Steve leans forward with a tentativeness Danny wouldn't have thought he had in him. It makes Danny's heart hurt a little bit.

"You wanna try that again now that I'm not blindsided?"

The deer-in-the-headlights look begins to dissipate from Steve's eyes, which is definitely progress, but he still seems cautious, like part of him thinks Danny might be joking.

Onscreen, the Pats score, and the announcers start yelling about the unlikelihood of the touchdown - a game-changer, one of them exclaims right before Danny presses the power button on the remote. The room descends into silence, just Danny and Steve and the distance between them, and when Danny closes the gap, Steve melts into him like he's been wanting this for a lifetime. All at once, his inscrutable expressions make sense to Danny, an explanation for his sometimes too-long eye contact emerges and light spills over the dark moods he descends into whenever Danny goes on dates.

Really, Danny thinks, there were so many easier ways for them to get here than being boat-jacked and almost becoming shark food, but then Steve wouldn't be Steve, and Danny wouldn't want to be here at all.


End file.
